About Beckie

Let me introduce myself

Beckie Smith – Directing Consultant

I am the Directing Consultant at Flying Geese, having previously held the position of Director of Marketing and Development at The Roses Theatre in Tewkesbury for five years where I was responsible for all lines of commercial income, and more recently Head of Global Marketing for Imagination Workshop / Interactive Theatre International (ITI), which saw me work with some of the world’s most iconic venues including Sydney Opera House, Wales Millennium Centre and The Lowry.

I’m an expert in working for regional NPOs, where budgets can be tight and audience development targets can be tough, but where an audience member’s journey and relationship with the venue and programme provides genuine excitement. I have a wealth of experience on a global and international level where finance and income are paramount, and commercialism is the name of the game.

I’m a stable strategic thinker who takes a considered approach and combines natural logical thinking, with my ability to understand the bigger picture, and my confidence to listen to, or ignore, gut reaction. I’m also a lateral thinker, so some of my ideas are slightly less obvious, but come hand in hand with some of the best rewards out there. I am brave enough to take an educated risk with a view of trying something new and making waves in the industry. I turn heads when my passion and clarity resonate across a room and I make people interested who previously were not.

I am target driven and keep the goal of a project in the forefront of my mind but I am experienced enough not to be thrown off kilter when circumstances change.

I’m open, honest, approachable and engaging. I will easily fall in love with your project, because your project is my project and we take shared responsibility for it. It makes me smile when I know my work, is more thorough, more accurate, and more intricate than that expected.

Having graduated from Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama with a Post Graduate Diploma in Arts Management, it was here that I fell in love with the power of data analysis and how it can be used to track an audiences’ long-term journey with the arts. I get excited by profiling and segmenting, in the hope we can encourage people to increase their frequency of attendance or expand their arts consumption by trying something new.

I became a consultant because I value the power that data, insight and research has in making an organisation thrive. Having seen a number of organisations struggle, I can’t help but think that if someone championed their data analysis, their story may have been different. I am inspired by the case studies of insight agencies, replicating them in my own practice knowing that the only way to win over a board is to present indisputable facts and figures. To now be in a position to provide the services that I very much needed in my early career, and to empower and educate professionals like myself who long for this insight; is special.

I am particularly interested in projects that involve

Playing games with focus groups, creating experiments that test assumptions over segmentations.

Understanding the story that data has to tell us, and more importantly, what the next chapter of the story might be.

Convincing non arts companies to invest in the arts

Throwing a life line to organisations and departments that are struggling

My strengths include:

Acting as the matchmaker between marketing and fundraising to create new lines of income

Increasing global reach to develop audiences in new territories and bringing global audiences to you

Increasing audience and customer bravery by encouraging them to release their inner child and explore something new

Data mining and revealing the hidden stories that it can tell us

Strategic planning, from small creative campaigns that you can have fun with, through to three-year strategic plans required by ACE for NPO applications

Working for regional NPOs where budgets are really tight but the relationship with the audience provides excitement